Presidential Tracker

Presidential Tracker

The Presidential Tracker provides information on where the candidates have been holding campaign events since the end of the Democratic National Convention. As is to be expected, there has been a marked focus on swing states. In fact, in 2012 after the Democratic National Convention, the candidates only held campaign events, defined as events meant to court voters in the place where the events are held, in 11 states. However, they have been fundraising heavily in places where they are not campaigning, such as New York, California, Texas, and Georgia.

In addition, since 2009, FairVote has been tracking the movements of the President Obama using data from the Washington Post's ‘POTUS Tracker' in order to examine the effect of battleground status on presidential attention. Fairvote's analysis of Presidential visits and events shows a significant emphasis on the declared 'battleground states' for the 2012 election and, in the period before the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, a heightened attention to states with high donation rates in the 2008 election. We have also tracked where Mitt Romney has spent his time campaigning since he became the presumptive Republican nominee on April 24, 2012.